VKS News

The VKS has nominated Katy Boerner for the KNAW visiting professors programme, and the award has been granted. Katy Börner is the Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science at the School of Library and Information Science, Adjunct Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistics in the [...]

The NWO Veni proposal “Deviant Art: Mapping the Alternative Art World” of Almila Akdag Salah has been granted. The study contributes to theoretical discussions about the nature of (high/low) art and the art market, and its relation to online art communities. Almila will be hosted by the new e-humanities group of the KNAW during the [...]

In the frame of the COST action MP0801 ” Physics of Competition and Conflicts” an international workshop on “Modelling Knowledge Dynamics” took place at the VKS, October 9-10, organized by Andrea Scharnhorst. About 30 participants (from the Netherlands and abroad) discussed methods of mapping, measuring, and modelling processes of knowledge creation in the sciences. Remarkable [...]

CALL FOR PAPERS Participatory knowledge production 2.0: Critical views and experiences Workshop organized by Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio, Maastricht, 23 March 2011 In recent years, much attention has been given to the ways in which new applications of digital technologies (sometimes called social networking or Web 2.0 or crowd sourcing) enable more and better participation [...]

What are the issues? What can researchers do? In the framework of the project ‘e-research ethics’, a workshop will be held in Amsterdam on 12 October 2010. In the course of the afternoon, participants will discuss and reflect on the issues around ethics of e-research and the role of researchers in addressing them. Debate around [...]

Prof. dr. Paul Wouters (1951) is the new director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (Centrum voor Wetenschaps- en Technologie Studies) at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He will take up this appointment on 1 September 2010. Wouters has also been awarded the research chair in Scientometrics at the Faculty of Social and Behavioral [...]

A new initiative has been launched by the Oxford e-Science Center and the VKS in collaboration with the UK Directorate for Digital Social Research. It will support discussion around questions like Does e-research raise specific ethical issues? Can researchers make their voices heard through a Manifesto for Ethics in e-Research? in order to initiate a [...]

In a series of short films on collaborative enviroments for researchers,Collaboratories, the added value these enviroments offer to researchers are explained. The films are based on the shared experiences with three innovative projects, executed within the SURFshare-programm during 2009. The following films on Collaboratories can be viewed (Dutch spoken!): General introduction of Collaboratories and the [...]

‘Scientists are not generally conservative by nature. If they have a preference for using a particular collaboration environment, there must be a reason. It’s therefore a good thing that SURFnet is working on this’. According to Paul Wouters, the scientific director at Erasmus Studio (Erasmus University Rotterdam), the fact that people want to continue to [...]

NWO has announced it will subsidize the project CLIO-INFRA, in which the VKS participates. CLIO-Infra will create a set of interconnected historical databases on worldwide social, economic and institutional indicators with which the study of the long term development of global inequality can take a major step forward. Some countries have become quite rich in the [...]

Dr T.L. Taylor will visit the Virtual Ethnography Collaboratory from 8-19 November 2010. Dr. Taylor is associate professor in the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. She has been working in the field of internet and multi-user studies for over fifteen years and has published on topics such as play [...]

Maastricht Studio – University of Maastricht, 14 April 2010 Workshop - Digital Making of Art and Science Last-minute logistical changes due to renovations in the original location notwithstanding, the April 2010 workshop of the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio didn’t leave a single seat unoccupied. 22 people with various disciplinary and institutional backgrounds gathered to discuss [...]

The Oxford Internet Institute (http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/) and the VKS have been awarded £26,000 to look at how researchers use web archives. The project is funded by JISC (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) which supports the innovative use of ICTs in education and research in UK higher and further education. To date, most attention has been paid to how best to [...]

On 29 April 2010, Marisa Ponti will defend her dissertation entitled Actors in Collaboration – Sociotechnical Influence on Practice-Research Collaboration, at the University of Borås, Sweden. VKS member Anne Beaulieu will act as opponent. Other members of the committee are Prof. Elizabeth Davenport, Napier University, Edinburgh; Prof. Elena Maceviciute, University of Borås, Borås and Dr. [...]

Nowadays humanities is under the pressure of applying evaluation methods and indicators, which were originally designed for disciplines where journal-based communication is the leading paradigm. With the aim to empower scholars by providing sophisticated information retrieval tools the Knowledge Space Lab team at the VKS has developed a website which allows to display the position [...]

2-Year Postdoc: user perspectives on direct to consumer psychiatric genetic tests The Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio(VKS), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University and the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis), University of Exeter are seeking a post-doctoral researcher to work for two years on an ESRC/NWO-funded project ‘Selling genetic tests online: [...]

Jan Kok co-edited with Jan van Bavel a book on the social and demographic problems of the Interwar period in The Netherlands and Belgium. The book, that came out this week at Universitaire Pers Leuven, offers on the one hand new quantitative analyses on e.g. the problem of small families, on the other hand studies of [...]